City boys in a yoga class seems like a mismatch. Most of us can’t imagine a banker in a downward-facing dog or pigeon pose, doing ujjayi breath or finding any kind of inner stillness.

Yet in the basement of 7 Moorgate at 7:15am on a Tuesday, I join a group of them at brand-new Blue Cow Yoga, the first yoga studio in the City, which opened at the end of last month.

We’re not only starting early so that all the students in the class can quickly skip down the road to be at work on time, but our teacher, Nora, will be doing the same. She works full time at PWC.

This morning’s class is slower and more sedate than my usual yoga practice. Most people present are still beginners. But the pace of the class is intentional for the time of day.

“We’ve thought carefully about which classes to hold and when,” says co-founder Mark Evans, who left the Army to start up Blue Cow with his friend Fran Gillibrand, who formerly worked for a start-up.

“People who come in the morning are going on to work, so they don’t want something that will leave them completely exhausted for the rest of the day. Likewise at 8pm you might not want a class to get you fired up again but might want something more relaxing, while there are more dynamic classes around lunchtime.”

The pair set up the studio when they found that struggling to get to their favourite yoga classes after work was only adding to their already stressful days and wanted to find a way to make yoga fit in with people’s busy lives, rather than the other way around.

So far the formula is working and 300 people are already attending Blue Cow classes every week, proving that overworked professionals are looking to yoga as a way of releasing some tension.

Indeed, yoga has been spreading across the City recently. Services such as YogaAt opened last year to provide yoga instruction in your office (and the offices of Citibank and HSBC) and was set up by a former venture capitalist, James Muthana, while new styles of yoga to suit busy professionals are cropping up at existing studios.

Evans knows plenty of bankers who have quit their City jobs to become yoga teachers. In fact, he has signed up two such ex-bankers to teach at Blue Cow.

And when Blue Cow trialled its project last year by using the office space below Moorgate that it planned to convert into studios to run some free promotional classes, “people in senior positions in banks were asking us when we were going to open and offering investment to get us started”, he says.

This whole place has been set up with the City worker in mind. You don’t need to carry a kit bag to work because towels, beauty products and hair straighteners are provided at no extra charge.

The entrance room is equipped with free WiFi, and free tea and coffee is available if you want to sit and work on your laptop for a while.

And since so many in the City are dedicated runners, free “marathon yoga” classes that concentrate on strengthening and opening the knee and hip joints are also on offer to anyone with a charity place to run the London marathon next month.